A portrait drawn in a quiet London room
The bass is a rumour, the drums a brushed secret, and then the saxophone of Stuart Matthewman draws a line so calm it could be mistaken for indifference. It is not indifference. It is control. Sade Adu enters as if she had been in the room the whole time and had simply decided to speak. Smooth Operator, from Diamond Life in 1984, is a character study set to a tempo that refuses to sweat. The man in the lyric is a professional of charm, a jet, a table, a lie told beautifully. She does not raise her voice to condemn him. Condemnation would be a kind of excitement, and the arrangement has sworn off excitement.
She wrote it with Ray St. John, a song about a type rather than a diary. Robin Millar produced Diamond Life at Power Plant in London, with Matthewman, Paul Denman and Andrew Hale, the band that would make quietness into a signature rather than a lack. The single took its time crossing the Atlantic and then sat in the American top five in 1985, a hit that sounded like a nightclub with the lights too low for anyone to perform panic. Millar’s mix leaves space the way a good tailor leaves cloth. Nothing is busy. The vocal is close, the consonants clear, the judgment delivered as description. You can dance to it. You can also hear, if you stop dancing, that the operator is being filed, not admired.
Adu has always been plainer about her method than the myth of mystery allows. She writes characters. The smooth operator is one of them, a man who uses people and calls it style. The glamour of the record is the trap for listeners who want the singer to be the character. She is the camera. On stage the song could grow a longer sax solo, a longer night. The studio version is the short story: verse, chorus, the title as both compliment and charge. Diamond Life made a career out of that distance. This track is the one the radio could not resist, because distance, well played, is sexier than pleading.
I write characters. The smooth operator is not me. He is a man I was watching, and the glamour is his method, not his virtue.
(Sade Adu, on the song)
It has been used since as the sound of sophistication, in films that need a bar and a secret. The use is not wrong. It is incomplete. The secret in the lyric is that sophistication is a method of taking. Adu sings it without sneer and without mercy, which is harder than either. Hale’s keys keep the room expensive. Denman’s bass never hurries the con. Matthewman’s horn is the smile that does not reach the job.
What remains is that temperature, still exact. Smooth Operator does not date into nostalgia because it was never trying to be the year. It was trying to be a portrait, and portraits of a certain cold skill stay current. The London room is quiet. The man is still working the room. The voice has already seen him.
